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Oh gosh, I CANNOT play horror games...I really liked the pacing and tension in this, even if I had to quit early due to nerves (watched a playthrough instead). The initial setup, the natural use of the spotlight to highlight next steps so that you always know where to go even if it's completely dark, important tips/post its being bright yellow - they're both natural to the environment (of course someone would leave notes on how to clean) while also hinting at game mechanics (the breaker) - it's just really well done. 

Anyway thanks for reminding me to clean my room over the new year so that the Horrors That Be don't get me.

Interesting, it feels like a shoot-em-up or arcade game but with a third dimension! I really like the concept, though definitely jumping could be polished, it feels a bit hard to line up at the moment. The cars move a lot horizontally, but they aren't really a danger if you're trying to avoid them, so it could probably help to speed up the entire game - that is, jumps are faster, cars also approach faster, and also add some progression - more cars as go on. I also think the amount of available jumps is pretty low compared to how many cars there are. But the idea is really cool, and I would like to play more games like it in the future if you continue!

There was a lot of content in this game! I don't know how much was actually implemented and how much is placeholder for later features, but that was definitely super impressive, and as far as I can tell the periodic upgrades are real. I don't think I actually got into combat with a lot of ships, I just got a lot of upgrades because time was passing, so I think the balance could be tweaked to adjust the rate of how often you get into encounters. Maybe that's just because I picked easy, since I never played this kind of game before. But it is neat. I think movement could be slightly tighter - I know it's meant to be slightly slow so that it could be upgraded, though. Maybe looking at the World of Warship series might be good inspiration. Neat genre to pick!

Fun platformer! The contrast and cohesion between the background and the foreground enemies was always pretty clear, so that was good, and the gameplay was pretty polished. I especially like the difference between all the enemies forcing you to use different strategies - you could dodge or parry trees, you had to look above for birds, the slimes are just regular fodder, but especially the blue running monsters, which appear quickly out of nowhere and force you to duck in time - makes it so that you can't just spam and hope for the best, you have to be deliberate in your actions. It was fun!

Wow, probably my first time playing through interactive art/media like this. A very cool experience. The pixel art is scratchy, rough, inaccessible, grainy, and all of that is great, actually, conveying more about the raw feeling and state of mind of the art as it was made, without any further cleaning up. I could not guess where anything would lead at any time, so I guess I was always on edge a bit while playing. Whether you had any intended experience for other people while releasing or if it's just a personal expression that you decided to publish, I'm glad that I was able to experience it regardless!

The visuals of this game are quite clean, I think maybe you could either commit to the high res geometric vibe or stick with the background which seems more artistic and layered but still monochromatic, neither seems like it could go wrong. Now to play devil's advocate I do actually think that the "awkward" controls make sense for the gameplay - metamorphosis should have some cost associated with it so you can't just freely switch to the one that best suits you, so the difficulty of having to navigate while morphing is actually a good thing here. There are other ways to potentially add that, like a cooldown between colors, the need to charge up a color before switching to it, locking movement while morphing over half a second, etc. which could all potentially serve the same purpose though. I think this would be a fun infinite arcade scroller - I don't know if the difficulty ramps up or not, it didn't as far as I could tell, but if it did, and after adding in a bit of challenge around the morphing process, it would be pretty zen to play.

Also the sound effect for hitting a mine is REALLY loud. That might be good to turn down or at least allow options for. But that's a minor issue.

Partially agree with previous but partially it's my own fault - I definitely also tried to jump as a tadpole...oops...but overall it was cute, frogs were definitely a favorite trend across designers with this theme, and you had a good interpretation of it too. Making it so you only evolve when you get X amount of collectibles is a good way to progress by making the player explore all possible areas with their current evolution first  (I didn't even consider walking left at first, until I realized I had no more bugs to eat), adding challenge and ensuring they aren't progressing in the wrong order, and it also makes sense thematically. Congrats on finishing your first game jam! Hope you will participate in many more to follow, if you liked the experience!

The difficulty curve is really well designed and it very cleanly teaches you major mechanics without having to explain too much, which is great. The sound effect/visual also tickles my brain, that was very well crafted.  Overall a very nice iteration of sokoban that feels simple and clean. Makes a lot of sense with the overall darkened/nihilistic mood.

I did also get stuck on the fly pellet - tried to gain momentum by swimming from far underneath but alas it was not meant to be. I really like the idea of this platformer though, especially if it becomes either a puzzle thing where you have to figure out the best order to evolve in per level to reach everything, or a quick reaction game where you have to cycle through the right forms at the right times. Lots of potential, and at least of the two forms I saw, each one controls differently with its own learning curve and they're both fun and control well. Awesome! Actually it almost reminds me of Geometry Dash - the standard cube can become several different forms, each with their own control scheme that is difficult in its own way. Overall nice work!

I love the idea and overall mood of this game. It plays like a stealth game, but it's not scary at all, and it's actually very sweet to use the idea that Santa simply doesn't want the kids to see him cause he's probably trying to secretly drop off their gifts. It also explains how all the food we leave out for him disappears. I wasn't very good at the game, so I don't know if specific items are more convincing at different parts of the rooms - if you ever had more time, that might be a cool feature to add. I also died a lot when the children suddenly turned around. I don't know how much time is given in between seeing you and dying, so that could just be my issue, but maybe making it slightly easier around doors would help too! Overall, it's a great interpretation of the theme.

This was super cute! I really loved the whimsy of it all, felt very fever dream/Alice in Wonderland-esque. The color palette is great, and the shading style reminds me of many older 3D games. The sense of scale is very good - you feel as small as a frog would, and the trees look very impressive in the background. I would love to see more games in this style. The only thing I would change is maybe the default mouse sensitivity - it could make me motion sick after playing for a while. I'm not sure if Unity makes it easy to change the sensitivity or not, but it's worth considering to help more players be able to play your game.

Really nice game feel, can definitely feel the celeste inspiration. The visuals are very clean and minimalist in a good way, lighting is clear, nothing is confusing and the palette is cohesive. Level design was also pretty good, it slowly taught the purpose of various platforms and interactables. I think maybe a slightly higher ratio of challenges to repeated stretches might be good, but that's subjective. The combat mechanic is interesting - there's definitely potential to add ways to interact with your arrows in a platforming context instead of having them solely be an enemy combat mechanic. Bouncing, sticking them to walls as platforms, maybe even some sort of recoil in midair...lots of possibility!

And the duck is cute

THE WEB VERSION DOES NOT WORK. This has to do with exported resources in Godot. To actually play the game, please download the executable. Read the description of the game for more details/FAQs.

This is a prototype. Several things are incomplete. The main loop is playable, but requires manual adherence to the rules. It has also not been completely balanced. If it seems like you don't have enough ingredients every day, do more minigames.

There is a cylinder in the restaurant area. Colliding with it shows you the intended day end menu with a summary of the day's happenings. You will start the next day. Please check it out.

Feedback is welcome. We know things like "the rhythm game has only one beatmap" or "you can play more than 3 minigames per day", so if you can, please focus on suggestions that are not bugs/incomplete features!

Thanks for playing!

Yes! So long as you can upload all relevant parts of the game for others to play via itch.io. All forms of games are welcomed.

Yes, added! Actually, after the previous message I did a deep dive to see what the issue was, and in the future people should not encounter this issue anymore - they should be directed to the correct welcome message which will send them down the right sequence of reactions to get relevant roles. I hope that it's clear to future readers/joiners that you must react to the pixel ram to get increased role visibility. But if you were unlucky enough to get softlocked in the process while I was changing it, sorry! Either way you should be good now.

Hey - sorry, this seems to happen to a random percentage of people and we can't figure out why. The member role is needed to freely browse the rest of the channels. Supposedly you can click on a pixel ram reaction at the bottom of #welcome to obtain it, and many people can, but some people can't. We will have to make some dummy accounts to figure that out. For now, we've added the role to you directly - poke around and enjoy! And if you're looking for people to team with, go to the channel #looking-for-group. #game-jam is for discussing the jam, though we're good with stuff in most channels so long as it's relevant to the theme of the channel! If anyone else has this issue, please leave a comment with your username and we'll add you as well.

This game clearly had a lot of thought put into its design! It is not necessarily a game of speed, but of endurance; however; all the mechanics work very well to encourage fast-flowing progression and minimal downtime, and deliberateness in all actions. Being able to pause for just a split second is really nice, as if you make a major blunder you're still stuck, but if you check beforehand, you're usually able to adjust. Having enemies drop health/resources is also a wonderful choice for players to make, as you can risk it for a chance to get stronger, or continue dodging and hoping that you're never forced to engage - but because you sometimes need to float, you'll eventually need to float anyway. You can't get far via mashing or low skill, because that just kills you so fast. There's constant pressure to keep moving, even without a timer, because of the monsters that come at you from above - this encourages fast thinking and not too much analysis paralysis, which would slow down the game for the player because they'd overoptimize, and make restarting less rapid. A really good game - really brought together by the clean visuals where enemies and players are quite readable.

Really well designed game. Clear objective and progression in the form of getting down ASAP and being able to do it better via speedrun times. Lots of options for a wide range of player ability. The risk/reward comes from how the elements in the game all encourage you to take it slow, from the fall damage to the obstacles. You have to be deliberate in taking this risk, balancing it with your dive time/health left. It's about commitment, as the dive shows - since you can't move at all. There are obstacles that can both help or hinder you depending on playstyle, like cobwebs and springs, which gives the players choice in how they want to use the environment to their advantage. Everything is well communicated via UI except for maybe the fall damage calculations, which felt unpredictable at times and led to many an untimely death, but didn't feel unfair overall. The setting is also pretty charming - the player character stands out well because she's so pink, which is important, and the overall concept is just kinda funny too.

I think the speed and scale of the game are really well tailored, as are the projectile speeds - nothing felt out of place there, which is super important for these types of games. It's a game where you can easily get into the flow and just chill out for a long time, which is a very valid way to design a game - if you're not careful you can get hit, but generally the asteroids are random enough that you're not just staying still, but predictable enough that you aren't upset when something ever hits you. The hitbox is large, but I thought that was an interesting way to change it up, it incentivizes active shooting, so that you don't get too passive with just dodging. Since the game advances at a fixed rate, I think changing up the means of progression would be best - it's currently just capped at how many you can shoot infinitely, which isn't necessarily skill based. Various upgrades and time survived might work well - definitely something to experiment with. Overall a satisfying take on a classic arcade game.

I like the idea of a platformer where combat and platforming are intertwined, so that you can only choose to do one or the other. It creates many interesting choices where you might try not to engage and just sneak past, or you might start hitting them nonstop, at the cost of not being able to go anywhere else - the 1 kunai limit is really interesting. Though it could also be slightly punishing. I did find the difficulty of fighting an enemy to be super hard, since they really like pushing you and you can't jump over them. I also had some trouble figuring out where I could go, so less visual detail would help a lot. The size changing was interesting, and I think there is a lot of potential for interactions with the kunai throwing and hiding and stuff - these mechanics all work separately at the moment (as far as I can tell) but perhaps certain sequences would require careful combinations of these mechanics to sneak past. Overall a nice setting and a cool hybrid combat/movement main mechanic.

There is a lot of depth to this game and brainpower to be expended on strategizing for it, which is pretty rare for a jam game (this is probably our first card game) - so the complexity must be commended. Agree with the others that the explanation/learning curve is pretty steep because of the interactions - you are definitely taught enough to start playing, but not enough to progress far. I think it's a valid design choice to hide the values of potential damage and similar indicators, so that the player only sees their success in real time as they commit to a play. This is similar to some card games like Balatro, where the information is available but not given. Also, not moving the cards seems annoying, though it is valid after the first turn, as it means you have to think about potential chains and deathsbefore you start placing. Still, balancing between quality of life and intended difficulty/thought required is important, and that's just something you can experiment with. Explicit rules and formulas for chaining at the minimum would definitely help, or even visual indicators for valid chains. Also, having labels for health and attack on the cards would help. Somehow, I kept forgetting which was which, and it also didn't show current values. Lots of mental energy required. But it is a card game after all! All this stuff is both an obstacle to players and also the source of difficulty, so don't think of it as a problem, just a trait!

I play quite a few rhythm games, so seeing more of the genre is nice. The overall aesthetic of the game is really tight, and the autoscrolling background probably took some work to implement - it's not distracting at all though because of the well placed sidewalk, so everything is readable. It's like the music is hitting the guy and he's listening to it. 2 note types, while mechanically very simple, was probably the right choice because you were not manually mapping things, so the model couldn't distinguish between more than 2. This is definitely more of a tech demo than a designed game since the outcome is individual and not deterministic for anyone, but that's fine, because it shows the potential that games could have by implementing some degree of ML in algorithms they use, if any, and also because it's straight up impressive to even think about attempting this, let alone successfully complete it within a week or so.

Won't comment too much on the gameplay since that is taken from Deltarune; to iterate on it would just be seeing DR's strengths/weaknesses and taking notes. Patterns are fair, though the myturn guy predicts your movement a bit too much. The strength as people said before is the aesthetics - palette shows a lot of self restraint, and each area is clearly defined with a range of hues (golden area vs blue area) which makes the contrast feel so strong. The palette feels inherently nostalgic because it resembles older games. The high saturation is used very sparingly to bring attention to important setpieces like the giant pile of bodies and the blood on the walls, which all contributes to world building and intrigue. Also, good separation between background and foreground even without the use of tilemap-like sprites. Perhaps the player character could use some more separation from the world, but everything is still pretty easy to read, not cluttered. Would love to see more of the mysterious setting.

Really interesting mechanic, well designed. A platformer purely based on arc movement is rare, and the controls are really tight. You can always predict how you move and where you'll grapple; timing is what's being tested. There wasn't any crazy momentum, so you are in control of where you go. As the game stands now, there's just one level which serves more as a mechanic demo than anything, but this could definitely be expanded with progression elements to involve more puzzle or execution elements, and some progression in difficulty - that, or it could incentivize speedrunning and clean play. Lots of potential here; the base controls feel really good.

This is a really nicely executed idle game - it may seem mechanically simple, but the types of upgrades one can get and the progression curve do matter, and I think while the progression curve was a bit fast, the upgrades were well designed. You can essentially opt for higher prices, automated collection, or easier collection, so the player always gets to choose how they progress, and can sort of adapt based on how willing they are to be active with the game. There's also a lot of charm and silly worldbuilding in the descriptions and really the entire premise of building a leaf empire - really makes you think about the arbitrary monetary value we assign to most things. For some reason, the game doesn't run when you click out of the window or even unfocus it though, which makes it slightly hard to be a true idle game - this could just be a system or export issue, but it would definitely impact playing experience. That was just a minor quirk. It probably doesn't matter since the current game can be beaten very quickly. Overall fun, could be a solid contender in the mobile game market, and would be refreshing because of the theme.

A game that really takes a risk and fully leans into its aesthetic, and it pays off very well. Each of the characters are expressive/exaggerated and imply a world beyond just the abstract stuff we see, and subtle worldbuilding is done just through backgrounds. The messiness is there, but entirely coherent with itself. The bullet hell is also mechanically interesting - you are the bullet, so instead of passive dodging, you have to actively advance, so simple shot patterns are not an issue, because the enemy movement is what you are actually paying attention to. High levels of drag mean you have to start planning your path early and timing the trajectory, rather than just hanging out right below the enemy until there's a gap - which makes sense for a missile, though it could still be a bit faster. The health cooldown thing, which seemed odd to me at first, makes sense if you wanted the player to be very deliberate/slow about every aggression they make - which thematically works - you can kill, but at what cost? Probably the more annoying mechanic was slowly drifting down when hurt; I think it probably wouldn't hurt overall gameplay to make that reset faster, especially as you can't move, so it's just pure downtime. I think the deliberateness of the game makes it a slow anti-bullet hell, and some people might be annoyed by that, but it totally works for the theme.

Very thematically consistent with the rest of your games (lol) and with an iconic visual style too. NPC behavior is really diverse here and the telegraphing of whether you are following trends or not is both gameplay-useful and fits the narrative. Though some things lack explanation, arguably they improve the theming of the story, such as not knowing whether you have truly fitted in or not yet. The overall loop is clear; you have to check the trend, go to the right place, and select the right outfit, and you have to execute it under implicit time pressure, which keeps the player on their toes, and they get rewarded with green particles. However, I am curious as to why this was made to be walking back and forth as opposed to just pulling up a menu immediately - not sure what the game design choices are there. It could probably get tedious or repetitive as levels get harder - I am not sure what progression would look like besides faster trends and more trends, but your physical speed wouldn't pick  up - so I think if there are physical storefronts, secondary mechanics that make use of them somehow would be interesting to explore. I'm also just saying this as a motion sickness prone player. Perhaps even using NPCs as hints, such as entering a certain physical store more than others (maybe this was implemented, I can't tell) and rewarding player observation that way would be cool. Overall really interesting concept, definitely has a lot of technical details.

My thoughts on senator-cide will remain private, however, this game makes it look quite enjoyable and relaxing! Physics based puzzles are pretty fun in general so long as the physics are predictable and don't become a chaotic system quickly; this definitely passes the test. There's a lot of potential to be had with the mechanic, such as more moving parts, walls, bouncy stuff, etc - it would be a challenge of precision and timing. I like that you have a set amount of senators and the ratio of senators needed, since it prevents players from brute forcing through each puzzle, but allows enough for deliberate experimentation, and only a slim margin of execution error. This would probably have to vary per level and be balanced. Overall, interesting premise and great start to designing for the mechanic; definitely brimming with potential.

This was a really creative take on the theme, and has some very efficient setting-building, with the kinds of jobs you take, and what all the UI and sprites look like and all. Definitely enjoyed the premise of the game. The risk/reward balance of taking more jobs is also in theory a great way to adjust progression based on skill level and reward skillful clothes-saving. It's nice to have flat progression as well for those who aren't good at the game. During the day loop, there is some jank with clothes following an elastic shaking pattern/falling off randomly, which is probably just due to bugs, which makes the upgrades somewhat hard to assess - also, it seems that there's no downside to spam clicking all clothes, which makes some of the rewards moot - however, with just a bit of code adjustments and adding cooldowns, those would quickly be solved and the difficulty of the mechanics would really shine through. Overall quite fun and entertaining, especially watching the clothes freak out all over the screen.

The visuals of this game are really cohesive and the scale of everything feels just right so that you get the sense of being a small, somewhat helpless bird in a vast snowy plain - sense of scale is not always easy to design for! The contrast between player and background is also really nice, and so is the UI stylization - it all feels like classic Asian scroll paintings. This definitely had an excellent visual identity. Probably the only hard-to-read part was the wind - aesthetically they look fine, but don't give enough gameplay information - at least not enough to figure out when they might appear/how to advance forward consistently. It's possible that the game overall was just not balanced yet for that though. Since the entire game is based around the skill of being able to time the flaps to the tailwinds, visual telegraphing would be great. Definitely a cute little infinite scroller, I could see this being a mobile game or a variant of the Chrome offline dinosaur game.

This is probably one of the most creative interpretations of the theme in this jam, and so it immediately stood out to a lot of people as having potential, which is awesome! I'm not sure if this genre fusion exists, so understandably you'd have to work out many design choices on your own, and you did a pretty good job. Both the fighting and rhythm game aspects are as expected, but the interesting part is transitioning after you hit a  fighting game health threshold, and having both the rhythm game and mash section impact the health as well. A lot of strategy/appeal could come from making this transition logic more complex - so that players would be kept on their toes by constantly juggling the 3 different modes and switching between them, being sure not to do the wrong keystrokes at the wrong time - and timing transitions to mess someone else up as well. The base gameplay as presented is definitely a little sluggish just because it was made so quickly and probably didn't have time to get balanced with appropriate timers/iframes.  But again, with more exploration of the mechanics, this could be a really interesting game with a high skill ceiling.

Your visual novels are always quite enjoyable, and you do well with establishing existing dynamics between the player and the characters right from the beginning, which is awesome! In general, choices in the game are meaningful, which is very important for a visual novel - all of them contribute to the ending or the romance path somehow. It was also a smart choice to help break up the "acts" of the story mentally in the player's head by transitioning from text to exploration back to text, and gives the player a greater sense of agency, even if the end result is the same as just clicking a choice of who to talk to. It feels like you're actually approaching the character, which builds that connection. The density of text definitely becomes a problem if you intend to replay, since there's no built in rewind, but that's just a result of moving away from RenPy into Godot and can be fixed with time. In general, more choices, especially near the ending (which included a LOT of third party exposition) would break up the long stretch of clicking too. Super cute and full of heart, and just as a narrative it holds up well, as evidenced by the fanart!

Getting a polished, working project done over 2 days is a super impressive achievement, and I love the dressup genre representation, we don't get much of those! Dress-up is usually more of a mechanic/toy where you can't really make wrong choices, so I thought it was an interesting design choice to dress up for a specific goal and incorporate some sort of plot/challenge into the game. I could see this being expanded as a full puzzle game where each stage requires you to dress some way to pass. Sort of like Dress to Impress, but more hard-coded and linear in storyline. The second level began to include that, though it was quite obvious about what to do, which took away some of the puzzle aspect. But overall it was a really cohesive game. The art was clean and stylish, and the game was super on theme (both for HackNC and for the jam theme!)

LOL THIS HAS TO HAVE TAKEN YOU OVER 5 MINUTES

but really thanks for giving it a go! I'll probably come back to this after our own jam is over and add some stuff to make it a game and not a barebones mechanic demo. looking forward to beating your game as well

cheers!!

May this shall be the first of many indeed! Looking forward to updates and anything else you do with this game over the summer - more mechanics, more levels, more background art, whatever - it better have more devlogs (or at least other projects started) by the time school's back in session!!

This is a pretty feature-complete top down game, with combat, puzzles and lore, so there's something for everyone in there! I like that lore is generally optional to engage with and you can go through the world at your own pace, and honestly even the combat is optional if you choose to just try to navigate through areas as fast as you can. This can be a good or bad choice depending on how you want your game to feel. The fact that mirrors can bounce off what looks like their back side took me a couple seconds to understand, which may be due to the sprite appearance, but it is overall easy to grasp. My biggest gripe was with the level with all the doors, as that personally felt a little tedious to get through when you don't know the path beforehand, it just becomes a lot of waiting and trial/error, especially since the animation cooldown is quite long, and it doesn't require skill or thought by the player so much as luck and experimentation. Still, I liked the laser puzzles, so it could be just personal preference of what people enjoy as puzzles. 

Love the charm in this game! So surreal and I had no idea what was going on, but I liked the tone in which the dialogue was written so it made it enjoyable. This could get pretty political if you really tried to analyze it, lol. It tickled me that you couldn't get the soda the first drive around, which immediately set the tone of the game, and everything else was just icing on the cake. I don't think I got as many endings as Asimile, but since each playthrough was so short, it was easy to try to go through different endings, and you can never really guess what's going to happen next. I think this type of game wouldn't be for everyone, since the payoff is entirely in the perceived humor and receptiveness to the narrative, but for those who do enjoy it, it's a very unique experience that they don't often get, so it would be cool to continue making games like this I think.

I agree with everyone else that the atmosphere setup was very good here! I have issues with 1st person motion sickness so I'm glad that there was a sensitivity option to play the game this time, which brings it down almost to a bearable level or me. The fog of war effect is great for adding difficulty and suspense to enemies, and having directional audio also makes it more suspenseful but also helps you actually survive, since without them you can easily get sneaked up on. The idea to make sprint not permanent is great too, since now you have to take risks and make choices of whether you want to navigate faster but risk being caught by enemies or just play it safe and be able to dash out. I wasn't able to get very far into the game since the camera moving around meant I didn't want to stare at the screen too hard and individual items were hard to distinguish from the general environment, but I can tell that the game has a lot to offer. And of course who doesn't love off brand corporate parodies.

I can't play horror LOL, I almost quit your game because I just get too anxious too easily.  It reminds me of the old RPGmaker top down horror games that I used to play, which given your art I guess you were inspired by, so that was nostalgic. The audio effects are very effective and I know I had to take off my headphones before trying to hit the monster things and see what happens - having audio just adds to the horror so much more. This is especially true when you have to walk towards it and it's off screen - horror comes from the anticipation, not necessarily the payoff, and that is very apparent here. It is also particularly terrifying to see the electricity and think what is that oh GOD WHY DOES IT LOOK HUMAN?? This was probably unintentional but you  move way slower up/down than left/right which kinda added to the horror since I couldn't escape as fast. Now, I was slightly confused on how to play the game since I was just progressing through the payphone area and then to the lights, and I knew the things were probably averse to light from the dialogue, but I couldn't find a way to progress. Still, big props to setting up the feeling of horror in such a short time!